Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
Long-windedness aside, your thought process is fairly sound. However, keep in mind that Plan 9 represents an escape from the perversion of Unix. Is a compromise between Plan 9 and Plan X worth the risk of history repeating itself?
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
I appreciate your time and consideration in your responses, thanks! You made several points and asked several questions this email, however it's difficult for me to answer them because they appear to be put forth under the idea that Plan X's purpose is to natively host common popular consumer-level, end-user applications of various sorts under Plan 9, and/or to port gnu to Plan 9. There also seemed to be a lingering impression that I'm suggesting that Plan 9 proper - the official distro - should be subject to the changes proposed by Plan X. However I think it's crucial that the current official Plan 9 distro continue as it always has. And I don't personally see enough value in the notion of gnu gcc and autotools being ported, or firefox and gtk, etc.. I do see value in porting LLVM/Clang, which would help enable, for instance, a forked and customized _subset_ of the EFL core libraries (not the E wm), ported and running like a native Plan 9 citizen via /dev/draw instead of X. I'm imagining an alternative Plan 9 distro that jettisons just a couple select characteristics of the system which drastically increase the net sum total alien'ness that tends to obfuscate and/or divert attention away from (what I believe to be) the more important aspects of the Plan 9 experience, such as the ones I listed previously: * 9P * mutable namespaces * union directories * ubiquitous fileservers * transparent distributed services Slightly more POSIX - but not total POSIX compliance - in addition to a non-gnu compiler that supports modern standard C dialects and other C-based languages would be an enabler for a greater number of people hoping to apply Plan 9 concepts under a broader and more general variety of purposes. But even all that begins to miss the original attempted point of my first post: the idea that perhaps it could be beneficial if there were some means for interested Plan 9 fans to rationally discuss and speculate on different potential expressions of Plan 9 based operating systems. Attempting to do so here on 9fans continues to be a traditional source of agitation and flames, tempered with a healthy dose of shut up and code. (that's not an accusation or scornful judgment, just a statement of a thing). I thought that perhaps talking in terms of what a 'Plan X' _might_ look like would be less divisive/threatening than talking in terms of what Plan 9 ought or ought not become. Cheers On Saturday 17 April 2010 00:41:19 lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: ... are simply - by far - much more important and practical to a greater number of people than these other prominent Plan 9 idioms: * radical frugal simplicity throughout the entire system This would remove itself as soon as the developer base increases beyond an indeterminate critical mass. That's precisely how Linux grew beyond Minix. But there is Linux already out there, so no clarion call to developers to move to a less popular platform. Plan 9 and NetBSD have many philosophical issues in common and both suffer (benefit?) from a shrinking user base because populism (fashion) rules. Polluting Plan 9 with fashionable toys isn't going to save the world, isn't even going to be useful to the existing Plan 9 community, so why do you believe it should happen, rather than allow Plan 9 as it exists, both as a philosophy and as the implementation of this philosophy, to demonstrate that a simpler lifestyle is also sufficient? What do you see in a liberated Plan 9 that would make it superior to the existing tools out there? Or, to ask the same question in a different form, why do you pick on Plan 9 to become your target platform through unwelcome (*) transformations instead of transforming that which is already much closer to your objectives? (*) unwelcome both because some of us believe it to be ethically undesirable and because the more pragmatic ones amongst us have not found sufficient motive to focus on them. Take fgb, for example, who found cause to port curses to Plan 9, opening the door to many new developments: few have done much with this, what changes would you effect that would increase these contributions significantly? * a stance against POSIX and other standards The stance is against polluting Plan 9 with inconsistent, committee-defined functionalities that often contradict even common sense. Posix is yet another cesspool where nothing is ever removed, no matter how foul. * a stance against alternate programming language paradigms Not at all, only against extending C in a direction that has been shown to be counter-productive. Alef was dropped out of necessity, Python and Perl are available, Go has been considered, Tcl was ported moderately easily, it is only the G++ model of C++ that has been proved intractable. Sadly, that is what everyone is clamouring for, so it looks like a much bigger issue than is truly the case.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
On Saturday 17 April 2010 00:28:42 SHRIZZA wrote: Long-windedness aside, your thought process is fairly sound. Sorry for the annoying verbosity. It's difficult for me to express the ideas more succinctly in a manner that reduces the risk of flames or misunderstanding. However, keep in mind that Plan 9 represents an escape from the perversion of Unix. That remains a valid, useful, and extremely valuable design goal. It's imperative that the current official Plan 9 sources and distro remain undisturbed. Is a compromise between Plan 9 and Plan X worth the risk of history repeating itself? I realize I'm not omniscient - heck I'm not even very talented! - but I'm not seeing how LLVM/Clang, and a little more POSIX (where necessary to help port and 9'ify _select_ libraries) - induces a significant risk of folks aiming to UNIX'ify (or LINUX'ify or GNU'ify) Plan X. The GNU/*NIX'ification of a Plan 9 based operating system just seems to be a completely counter-productive, non-viable endeavor. I couldn't imagine such an act of sheer pointlessness to gain much traction. Though I can imagine reasonable temporary stop gaps being used when necessary, to be deprecated once the kludges in question are replaced with their appropriately 9'ish solutions. Cheers
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
fre 2010-04-16 klockan 23:49 -0700 skrev Corey: I've been considering the prospect of implementing a kencc dialect for the clang c front-end). It is more practical to start with adding LLVM IR target to kencc. You won't get Clang's source analysis/refactoring features this way, but it is a quite straightforward task, I plan to do it as part of my GSoC project (which is creating a C compiler for Inferno with LLVM).
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
But even all that begins to miss the original attempted point of my first post: the idea that perhaps it could be beneficial if there were some means for interested Plan 9 fans to rationally discuss and speculate on different potential expressions of Plan 9 based operating systems. That's called show us the code! around here :-) It is frustrating to get only negative responses whenever issues like this are raised, but you have to realise that those who agree with you are not prepared to do the work and thus they have learnt to shut up as they have nothing to put up. Those who do put up, like fgb, do not seek approval: they deliver the goods and know that they are appreciated and utilised. I guess that means that you ought to do the same. To use myself as an example, I'd be very pleased to find support for my efforts at porting GCC to Plan 9 (yes, I have a working version, but I'm not happy with the results), of adding ELF capabilities to the Plan 9 kernel (done that, but testing it is a totally different kettle of fish), of consolidating the Plan 9 native C toolchain with the fresher Go model, then adding mips-64 to it and producing Plan 9 native or ELF code from it all. But it's not something I can expect anyone else to work on with me, although a lot of work has been done by cinap and I have learnt much from it. These balls are all in my court: not very communal development, but that is the spirit of Plan 9 and many believe that Plan 9 is what it is because of this individual effort. You (and I, even) may disagree, but history suggests that communal development as it is known now leads to irreversible bloat. So if you have a brilliant idea (not some grandiose concepts with little meat) you have to be able to deliver on it before anybody here will adopt it. Putting it another way, no one believes you when you claim that there is another path out there that will lead to Eldorado. Bring back some gold nuggets and you'll see an immediate attitude change. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
-Original Message- From: 9fans-boun...@9fans.net [mailto:9fans-boun...@9fans.net] On Behalf Of Corey Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 5:39 AM To: 9fans@9fans.net Subject: Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!) I appreciate your time and consideration in your responses, thanks! You made several points and asked several questions this email, however it's difficult for me to answer them because they appear to be put forth under the idea that Plan X's purpose is to natively host common popular consumer-level, end-user applications of various sorts under Plan 9, and/or to port gnu to Plan 9. There also seemed to be a lingering impression that I'm suggesting that Plan 9 proper - the official distro - should be subject to the changes proposed by Plan X. However I think it's crucial that the current official Plan 9 distro continue as it always has. And I don't personally see enough value in the notion of gnu gcc and autotools being ported, or firefox and gtk, etc.. I don't see any value at all. This makes me wonder why you bring up... I do see value in porting LLVM/Clang, which would help enable, for instance, a forked and customized _subset_ of the EFL core libraries (not the E wm), ported and running like a native Plan 9 citizen via /dev/draw instead of X. Could you elaborate? While looking into the LLVM's source, several times, is mostly garbled crud (although better than GCC), and they severely over-optimize. I also don't understand why one would choose the EFL? It's not even stable yet. Unless my memory fails me, the EFL was in C++. I could be wrong on this though. You're basically asking to re-write a compiler and libraries, and call them a port. I'm not sure I understand what you're thinking. I'm imagining an alternative Plan 9 distro that jettisons just a couple select characteristics of the system which drastically increase the net sum total alien'ness that tends to obfuscate and/or divert attention away from (what I believe to be) the more important aspects of the Plan 9 experience, such as the ones I listed previously: * 9P * mutable namespaces * union directories * ubiquitous fileservers * transparent distributed services Slightly more POSIX - but not total POSIX compliance - in addition to a non-gnu compiler that supports modern standard C dialects and other C-based languages would be an enabler for a greater number of people hoping to apply Plan 9 concepts under a broader and more general variety of purposes. This I don't understand at all. Why would one need a separate Plan 9 distribution? Why don't you improve APE, and write compilers for the languages you need? There is no need for a fork. But even all that begins to miss the original attempted point of my first post: the idea that perhaps it could be beneficial if there were some means for interested Plan 9 fans to rationally discuss and speculate on different potential expressions of Plan 9 based operating systems. Attempting to do so here on 9fans continues to be a traditional source of agitation and flames, tempered with a healthy dose of shut up and code. (that's not an accusation or scornful judgment, just a statement of a thing). Yes, well no one codes. It's not so much shut up, as it is, stop asking us to do it. A good building isn't designed by slapping any good idea into it. A good bridge isn't either. Good medicine isn't created by putting any chemical that helps in. They are engineered for ideal effectiveness. Plan 9 is in many ways, the same. All we ask for, is a reason why what people want to add is a good thing. Just simple rationale. You're a free being and free to do as you please, no one is stopping you. I thought that perhaps talking in terms of what a 'Plan X' _might_ look like would be less divisive/threatening than talking in terms of what Plan 9 ought or ought not become. Cheers
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
On the other hand: doesn't individual development suffers from at least two problems? (1) lack of a common vision leading to potentially widely divergent and incompatible solutions (2) lack of sufficient energy (manpower etc.) behind any given project development to make any real headway. Presumably there's a happy medium between supreme bloat and minimalism? K lu...@proxima.alt.za 17/04/2010 8:20:59 am You (and I, even) may disagree, but history suggests that communal development as it is known now leads to irreversible bloat. So if you have a brilliant idea (not some grandiose concepts with little meat) you have to be able to deliver on it before anybody here will adopt it. Putting it another way, no one believes you when you claim that there is another path out there that will lead to Eldorado. Bring back some gold nuggets and you'll see an immediate attitude change. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
On the other hand: doesn't individual development suffers from at least two problems? (1) lack of a common vision leading to potentially widely divergent and incompatible solutions Yes, but the products are small enough that one can bring two incompatible strands together. Whereas dealing with a _single_ version of GCC is a nightmare that no one wants to tackle. So we swallow its insanities and call them features. More to the point, we let ourselves become dependent on it because we imagine that there are no alternatives. And in fact, there aren't any, if we measure them by the very bloat that we have become dependent on. (2) lack of sufficient energy (manpower etc.) behind any given project development to make any real headway. We sent man on the Moon without GCC or autoconf. It concerns me that the number of features we seem unable to do without is growing according to Moore's law. Presumably there's a happy medium between supreme bloat and minimalism? Maybe, but there isn't a mathematical formula defining this vague grey area. So when making a decision, you have to pick one of two mutually exclusive guiding principles. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
It's imperative that the current official Plan 9 sources and distro remain undisturbed. okay. it may not be your intention, but now you're trolling. you complained that the official sources were stagnant in your opening salvo. now you're arguing the opposite. hard to take this completely seriously. ... are simply - by far - much more important and practical to a greater number of people than these other prominent Plan 9 idioms: * radical frugal simplicity throughout the entire system i think you have the ideology wrong. from simplicity springs forth 9p, etc. without the frugal design none of the people who use plan 9/inferno professionally would have any interest in plan 9. simplicity is the key. * a stance against POSIX and other standards what's your justification for this opinion? plan 9 supports many standards. off the top of my head: icmp, bootp (pxe), dhcp, ip, udp, tcp, smtp, http, ftp, imap4, pop, dns, etc. * a stance against alternate programming language paradigms hmm. doesn't Aleph count? that language is dead and gone, but it was a quite different language than c. surely you don't mean that the plan 9 community should accept (or implement) all languages. * a strong bias towards a particular form of user interaction with the system (i.e. acme, rio, etc) suggest something better. if it doesn't exist, then implement it. convince people that you're ideas are better. - erik
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
On the other hand: doesn't individual development suffers from at least two problems? (1) lack of a common vision leading to potentially widely divergent and incompatible solutions (2) lack of sufficient energy (manpower etc.) behind any given project development to make any real headway. Presumably there's a happy medium between supreme bloat and minimalism? Look into the farm studies of Poland. Individual work has a benefit no community work can have; honor. That product's success or failure is going to affect the image of who created it. When an individual creates a product, it has a desire to see it succeed. When a group creates a product, they have a desire to get their paychecks. You can be right about the manpower issue. In no way could on man build a bridge, but one man can build efficient software.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
You can be right about the manpower issue. In no way could on man build a bridge, but one man can build efficient software. Even here there is room for disagreement. Do you think a community-designed bridge would be preferable to one designed by a single architect? The seminal concept of The Bazaar and the Cathedral overlooks the disasters the befell cathedrals designed by consecutive architects. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
-Original Message- From: 9fans-boun...@9fans.net [mailto:9fans-boun...@9fans.net] On Behalf Of lu...@proxima.alt.za Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 10:26 AM To: 9fans@9fans.net Subject: Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!) You can be right about the manpower issue. In no way could on man build a bridge, but one man can build efficient software. Even here there is room for disagreement. Do you think a community-designed bridge would be preferable to one designed by a single architect? The seminal concept of The Bazaar and the Cathedral overlooks the disasters the befell cathedrals designed by consecutive architects. Yes there is, but the disagreement in between what I wrote, and what you read. In the quoted sentence, I was talking about the building, or implementation, process. What you then began to talk about was the design process. ++L
Re: [9fans] Recommended emulators/VMs for P9 install
Joel C. Salomon wrote: On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Federico G. Benavento benave...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Joel C. Salomon joelcsalo...@gmail.com wrote: My computer died, so I'm in the market for a new one. I figure I'd like to get back into hacking on Plan 9 so I plan to install it beneath a VM in whatever machine I buy. I'm even considering Windows 7 Pro with Virtual PC, but I think I'd prefer Xen or one of the Linux-based things (VirtualBox, etc.). Ease of installation is important, as is the ability to run a somewhat normal (Windows or Linux) host OS. Are there any recommendations? vmware, the rest just suck, qemu and virtual box being the slowest How about Xen? Has anyone here had luck wit it? —Joel C. Salomon Years ago i had run Plan9 inside Xen and wrote even some tutorial how to set it up. After finding out, that filesystem performance was very bad i stopped perusing that project, so i can't tell how it'd go with current Xen. Regards, Jorge-León
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
Yes there is, but the disagreement in between what I wrote, and what you read. In the quoted sentence, I was talking about the building, or implementation, process. What you then began to talk about was the design process. Computer programming is much more design than implementation, unless I'm too old to keep up with new ideas and I've missed some radical change. The analogy of the construction of a bridge I believe is closer to the real thing if one considers the design rather than the implementation. Ergo... ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
-Original Message- From: 9fans-boun...@9fans.net [mailto:9fans-boun...@9fans.net] On Behalf Of lu...@proxima.alt.za Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 12:10 PM To: 9fans@9fans.net Subject: Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!) Yes there is, but the disagreement in between what I wrote, and what you read. In the quoted sentence, I was talking about the building, or implementation, process. What you then began to talk about was the design process. Computer programming is much more design than implementation, unless I'm too old to keep up with new ideas and I've missed some radical change. The analogy of the construction of a bridge I believe is closer to the real thing if one considers the design rather than the implementation. Ergo... Never said it wasn't. But you insisted on finding a part of what I said that you could troll, and began to troll. You have repetitively ignored the heart of my e-mails, and even ignored chunks of what I've said just to criticize me. I discussed design, and you ignored it. When I brought up implementation, you considered it as design. Unless you have something constructive to say, rather than make up some fantastic problem in what I say, I'm done here. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
You can be right about the manpower issue. In no way could on man build a bridge, but one man can build efficient software. Even here there is room for disagreement. Do you think a community-designed bridge would be preferable to one designed by a single architect? The seminal concept of The Bazaar and the Cathedral overlooks the disasters the befell cathedrals designed by consecutive architects. Yes there is, but the disagreement in between what I wrote, and what you read. In the quoted sentence, I was talking about the building, or implementation, process. What you then began to talk about was the design process. Sorry, that got a little more heated than I meant it to be. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 11:41 PM, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: Polluting Plan 9 with fashionable toys isn't going to save the world, isn't even going to be useful to the existing Plan 9 community, so why do you believe it should happen, rather than allow Plan 9 as it exists, both as a philosophy and as the implementation of this philosophy, to demonstrate that a simpler lifestyle is also sufficient? The image this brought to mind was Buddhism. Would Buddhism be better if it were infused with Evangelism? Doubtful. The next time I say, Not to engender a flame war, please kick me off the list, please. -Jack
Re: [9fans] APE: a further note.
-T is great. But Python can't be built with it. Python explicitly creates functions with type signatures that don't match and this makes -T very unhappy. the examples i had to fix (that didn't simply require #pragma incomplete) were errors, for instance something like the following: one function expecting a value in the middle of a structure that was #ifdef'd out for another function's compilation, because different #defines were in scope.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
I struggle with this. Groups can do things and have honour. And groups often do things without paycheques. I remember a group effort to implement Tiny C for microcomputers in the late 70s... it was a group effort and was plenty honourable... Patrick Kelly kameo76...@gmail.com 17/04/2010 10:19:40 am Individual work has a benefit no community work can have; honor. That product's success or failure is going to affect the image of who created it. When an individual creates a product, it has a desire to see it succeed. When a group creates a product, they have a desire to get their paychecks. You can be right about the manpower issue. In no way could on man build a bridge, but one man can build efficient software.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
The image this brought to mind was Buddhism. Would Buddhism be better if it were infused with Evangelism? Doubtful. As a very young Roman Catholic, I was quite taken by evangelism, I still have embarrassing memories of shedding a tear for a missionary amongst the lepers contracting leprosy himself. Today, I fail to see _any_ reason why a faith principle should even be _allowed_ to evangelise, nevermind that if it had any value it would be embraced automatically. I have the same problem with Plan 9. If the world wanted to see value in it, it would look harder than the resistance to popularisation that has defined Plan 9 development since 1995 when I first encountered it. By the same token, I don't expect others to provide the services I would find useful, even when I believe that what I would benefit from would be of general use to the community. Most new arrivals here fail to see that simply because Plan 9 isn't fashionable, there just isn't an infinite number of monkeys generating an infinite number of programs, some of which may even turn out handy. I miss some of these exceptional developments myself, but I'm not prepared to sacrifice the largely disciplined nature of Plan 9 to the largely undisciplined desires of the bazaar, by whatever name it may go. It's also a genie that won't go back in the bottle, and that ought to be cause to be really careful. What does get iritating is that yes, one could drop any resistance to change, but none of the objectives would be attained: Plan 9 would not be any more popular - Linux is still going to be streets ahead in popularity; the base of available programs wouldn't grow at any speed, because we'd still need someone to make the autoconf tools, GCC, G++ and BASH work under Plan 9, and that is no small task, specially if you include the resistance on the other side to accept Plan 9-oriented adjustments to their code. Reality is, Plan 9 is not a better Unix or a better Linux, it is itself. If you want something else, feel free to adopt Plan 9 as your foundation, but don't expect anyone here to follow you. Some may, but you can be certain with only the slightest shadow of doubt that no one here is going to _lead_ you where you think Plan 9 ought to be going. You'll have to be the path finder in that exercise. And if you haven't quite understood the implications, basically the Plan 9 community isn't going to put any effort in making Plan 9 more palatable to those who miss the features they have grown addicted to on other platforms: we're not going to do the work you wish done, consciously or subconsciously, on your behalf. You know it's too big a job, we know it's too big a job. Difference is, we don't want to do it while you think it may just happen if you can convince us it's for the greater good. That's where faith comes in and where logic walks out. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
Attempting to [discuss and speculate on different potential expressions of Plan 9] here on 9fans continues to be a traditional source of agitation and flames, tempered with a healthy dose of shut up and code. As it appears to me, this mailing list does tolerate such discussion, and I find the criticism to be generally useful. As for action rather than words, indeed. In any case, this discussion (and others) might become more useful by concentrating on illustrating useful ideas, rather than reinforcing perceived problems. So, tell us more of these women.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
I struggle with this. Groups can do things and have honour. And groups often do things without paycheques. I remember a group effort to implement Tiny C for microcomputers in the late 70s... it was a group effort and was plenty honourable... There will always be exceptions. Also, eadership can give a group an identity very similar to individuality and I suspect this merely confirms the statement you are commenting on. And then there is the sheer size of groups and the competing interests within any group, growing as the group grows. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
There will always be exceptions. Also, eadership can give a group an Oops, where did the l in leadership go? ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
You have repetitively ignored the heart of my e-mails, and even ignored chunks of what I've said just to criticize me. Sorry, knee-jerk response. If I disagree with what you say, I'm much more likely to include it and criticise it than to ignore it. And I see little value (to the community) in merely stating that I agree with you on something, as was the case with the first half of your message. So don't shoot from the hip, I do believe that the term friendly fire is an oxymoron when a bullet strikes me. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
-Original Message- From: 9fans-boun...@9fans.net [mailto:9fans-boun...@9fans.net] On Behalf Of lu...@proxima.alt.za Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 2:02 PM To: 9fans@9fans.net Subject: Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!) You have repetitively ignored the heart of my e-mails, and even ignored chunks of what I've said just to criticize me. Sorry, knee-jerk response. If I disagree with what you say, I'm much more likely to include it and criticise it than to ignore it. And I see little value (to the community) in merely stating that I agree with you on something, as was the case with the first half of your message. So don't shoot from the hip, I do believe that the term friendly fire is an oxymoron when a bullet strikes me. Yeah, this whole thing got a little out of hand. I was mad, not for the disagreement, but for misinterpreting what was (at least I thought) a clear statement. I tend to get that way; it's a bit of a pain. At any rate, you are right in saying no good comes from shooting you. I need to learn to save ammo for the true trolls ^^. Sorry about all this. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
Alright. Perhaps we're converging here. Small team is what I was thinking--I agree that as teams get larger they get more unmanageable and tend to produce less focused (and thus less efficient or pristine) results. This has been a helpful discussion for me in terms of trying to get the gist of the Plan9 ideology. K lu...@proxima.alt.za 17/04/2010 1:46:47 pm I struggle with this. Groups can do things and have honour. And groups often do things without paycheques. I remember a group effort to implement Tiny C for microcomputers in the late 70s... it was a group effort and was plenty honourable... There will always be exceptions. Also, eadership can give a group an identity very similar to individuality and I suspect this merely confirms the statement you are commenting on. And then there is the sheer size of groups and the competing interests within any group, growing as the group grows. ++L
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
* a stance against alternate programming language paradigms A few seconds rummaging through /n/sources/contrib turns up: scheme ocaml haskell lua limbo linda pforth python All these seem fairly alternate to me.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
On Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:58:00 PDT Corey co...@bitworthy.net wrote: The Plan 9ers have successfully prevented the Plan Xers from encroaching, but it's the Plan Xers who are going to find new and interesting expressions of a Plan 9 based operating system, however in order to bootstrap, the Plan Xers need the experience and insights of the Plan 9ers... yet there's an antagonistic conundrum that prevents the two perspectives from peering. You are worrying about the wrong things. If you really believe in your ideas, go ahead, create a plan 9 fork and find time to implement your ideas. Don't let the naysayers distract you. If people like what you're doing, they will follow you. It's as simple as that. This is how for instance DragonflyBSD came about. And by the way, you have not articulated your vision of what you want plan X to be (as opposed to what you don't want it to be). What use cases do you have in mind that might be better served by plan X? Are they important enough and different enough to warrant a fork? Then come up with a set of positive goals and an action plan on achieving that. Show that you can achieve a subset on your own and you will get a far more sympathetic response. This will be far more satisfying than arguing about what plan 9 should be.
Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)
perhaps Plan 9 is just the Black Books of software?
Re: [9fans] GSOC proposal
This is really too late for the GSoC bits. But possibly of interests for later developments... On Mar 25, 2010, at 6:03 AM, yy wrote: Would such a project be interesting for this year gsoc? Is any mentor interested in Forth? I really think acme would make a great environment for Forth development. I have not used 4th except to play a bit with it, but I have spent the last months porting the Ngaro VM to Go [1], which is used to run retroForth [2] images, and I think that could be a good starting point too. [1] http://hg.4l77.com/gonga/ [2] http://retroforth.org PS: I'm CCing this to the GSoC list, but since the original message appeared here I'm replying to 9fans too. A viable environment using in Plan 9 or Inferno to develop code for arrayForth and the GA line of chips that use it would be nice. Well, nice for a few of us who may have future board designs using those chips. Getting some Forth-SIM environment for any Plan 9 $objtype would help from having to run Windows IDEs on native x86 hardware or in VMs. Additionally, flashing the GA chips from Plan 9 sure would make development decisions easier. -jas
Re: [9fans] TeX: hurrah!
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 6:10 PM, Karljurgen Feuerherm kfeuerh...@wlu.ca wrote: It occurred to me that a profitable thing to do here would be to mention some things that would be nice to see in a new improved TeX... I believe bidirectional was mentioned already. The other thing that is essential for folk like me is complete Unicode compatibility [Yes, I know. UTC has committed many sins :] There are a few projects (in the TeX world) for that, primarily XeTeX and Omega. Omega is not much in use anymore, but its ideas live on in LuaTeX. The lack of C++ is going to hinder efforts to port these projects to Plan 9 as-is; and these are significant efforts, not likely to be duplicated by 9fans. (Perhaps the C++ library for PDF handling can be rewritten in C, and then XeTeX LuaTeX can be ported. But don't expect the projects to use the rewrite in favor of the original libraries.) —Joel Salomon
